When It’s Time To Fire Your Best People.

by Dan Waldschmidt

When It’s Time To Fire Your Best People.

One of the hardest challenges in business is to make sure that the people working in your company right now still deserve to be there.
Over time, as your business grows and develops, it’s natural for people to work themselves out of a job. Even though it hurts you to help them leave, you will cripple your ability to grow if you don’t help them move on.

When your business is small you usually hire people who are loyal in nature and generalists in skill.

These people are the ones who wear ten hats.

They know a little bit about everything. And they guard your business like it is their own.

You count on them for their loyalty and their insights. They aren’t just employees. They are confidants.

But as you grow, you need people who are driven and specialists. They aren’t loyal to you, they are loyal to the mission. To your goal for where the company needs to go.

That creates a natural conflict.

The new people joining your company don’t understand why you would let these generalists who seem incompetent compared to their own set of skills have so much sway over the direction of the company.

And the people who have been there the longest just assume that the new people making all the noise are just a bunch of whiny babies who don’t appreciate the history of the business.

If you’re not careful about managing this, you’ll have a situation where the new people leave with a broken spirit and the old people refuse to evolve.

It’s a lose, lose, lose situation.

You’ll have a business rich in stories from the past but unable to move quickly enough to conquer the future.

To change this pattern, you have to be militant about where you want to go and how you want to get there. And then plug people into the equation.

You don’t start with good people and then find jobs for them to do. You start with a good mission and then find awesome people to execute a specific part of it.

Once you know where the finish line is, you bring together the smartest group of people possible to ensure you get there.

That’s a tough decision to make.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for your business is the hardest decision you have to make about a long-time friendship.

No one should be allowed to stay on the team just because of what they’ve done in the past.

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About the author

Dan Waldschmidt is an international business strategist, speaker, author, and extreme athlete. His consulting firm solves complex marketing and business strategy problems for top companies around the world. Dow Jones calls his Edgy Conversations blog one of the top sales sites on the internet. He is author of Edgy Conversations: How Ordinary People Can Achieve Outrageous Success.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dan Waldschmidt is an international business strategist, speaker, author, and extreme athlete. His consulting firm solves complex marketing and business strategy problems for top companies around the world. Dow Jones calls his Edgy Conversations blog one of the top sales sites on the internet. He is author of Edgy Conversations: How Ordinary People Can Achieve Outrageous Success.

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